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After the Shooting

AUSTIN, Tex. — Fifteen years ago, on April 20, 1998, Jan Reid and three of his friends got into a cab in Mexico City. The four men were all affiliated with Texas Monthly, a magazine I’d worked for early in my career, which is how I knew Jan. They were in Mexico to attend a prize fight.

As Jan would later recount in his fine memoir, “The Bullet Meant for Me,” as soon as he got into the cab, he thought, “This doesn’t look right.” He quickly realized that the cab was being followed. The driver pulled over and allowed men in the other car to climb into the cab. They were brandishing guns.

After another short ride, during which Jan was pistol-whipped, the driver stopped, and the Americans were ordered out of the car. One of them ran for his life. In the chaos of the moment, Jan acted instinctively: He threw a punch at the gunman. The punch missed. The man shot Jan, who threw up his arm to block the bullet. It went directly through Jan’s arm and down into his abdomen, stopping just short of his spinal cord. He screamed in agony. “I thought it was curtains,” he told me recently.

With the six-month anniversary of the shootings at Newtown, Conn., approaching, I thought it was worth spending some time thinking about the “other” consequence of gun violence. Yes, guns kill people; Adam Lanza murdered 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School. But guns also leave victims permanently injured and in constant pain.

Think about the massacre last summer in Aurora, Colo., where, along with the 12 people killed, 58 were injured. Ashley Moser, 25, who was two months pregnant at the time, lost her baby and is now paralyzed. Once the news media moves on, however, people like her are forgotten. That’s why I came here to see Jan Reid.

Although his doctors in Mexico initially thought that he would be a paraplegic, Jan walks with a cane today; his left leg swings almost uselessly with each step. His speech is impaired. He has to use a catheter to urinate, which causes urinary tract infections on a regular basis.

Photo

Joe NoceraCredit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

He has been in the hospital a half-dozen times since the shooting, sometimes for dangerous blood infections that are a continuous result of the shooting. He has limited feeling in his legs and feet; once his foot was bleeding and he didn’t even realize it. He wound up being rushed to the hospital where a chunk of his foot was removed. About five or six years ago, he had a spinal cord stimulator implanted that has helped reduce the intense pain he used to feel in his legs. Although he can still have sex, he said, “it’s not like it used to be.” He flashed me a regretful smile.

As Jan recounted his life since that fateful day 15 years ago, he sat on his couch. Sometimes he leaned forward. Other times he sat back. He never seemed comfortable. He told me that if he stands up too long, it begins to hurt. If he sits too long it hurts. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, the pain wakes him up. Whenever he has the slightest fever, fierce pain shoots through his leg. “It feels like a firecracker just above my left knee,” he said.

Yet, for all his physical pain, when a hospital psychologist asked him early on what his biggest fear was, he said, “that this is going to destroy my marriage.”

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It didn’t, but it could have. Before the spinal cord stimulator was implanted, Jan’s pain was affecting not just him but those who loved him. He snapped at people and suffered from depression. Nobody felt it more than his wife, Dorothy Browne. In some ways, she is the hero of this story: she was by his side in the months after he was shot, doing all the things he couldn’t do, while refusing to let Jan feel sorry for himself.

But after things settled down, she grew angry. Not because he had gone to Mexico, or had stupidly thrown a punch at a man with a gun. “I was just angry that he was never going to be the same again,” she said. She missed the things they used to do together but no longer could: explore the rain forest, travel in the Andes, rock climb in Greece. She finally sought counseling, which helped. “I’m not angry anymore,” she said, “but I’m regretful. I’m regretful when I hear him in the middle of the night, knowing he is in pain.”

For everything he has gone through, Jan Reid considers himself lucky. He can still work. Indeed, last year, a much-praised biography he wrote of Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, was published. He has his wife and his friends and his life. He has figured out how to cope with his injury and his pain. He can walk.

Which, sadly, is something Ashley Moser can never say.

Nicholas D. Kristof is on book leave.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 13, 2013, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: After The Shooting. Today's Paper|Subscribe